Pages

December 18, 2014

Hear the VOICES!!!!

Hundreds of Women Demand High Level Committee to
Review National Family Planning Programme

Hundreds of women and men from as many as 10 states
in the country came together in Delhi on 17th DEC for a Public Hearing to relate the
experiences they had undergone while availing of family planning services in
the government health system. The testimonials of the victims, presented before an
eminent panel of experts and others including Member of the National Human
Rights Commission Justice Cyriac Joseph,raised important questions on issues of informed
choice, quality of care, youth perspective and male responsibility.

Outraged by the entirely preventable
deaths of 13 young women in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh who were merely seeking safe
contraception, the National Coalition Against Coercive Population Policies and
Two-child Norm, the National Alliance for Maternal Health and Human Rights
(NAMHHR) and 45 other civil society organizations and networks like HealthWatch
Forum Uttar Pradesh and Maternal Health Campaign Madhya Pradesh held the Public
Hearing to show that what happened in Chhattisgarh was not an isolated
incident. The hearing brought to the fore experiences with the family planning
health system from the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi,
West Bengal, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Bihar, Jharkhand and Rajasthan.

They
issued an urgent Call to Action asking the government to immediately set up a
high level expert committee to review the family planning program in India and
reorient it such that it is aligned with reproductive health rights of women and
needs of the population. The Call to Action has also asked to shift the
distorted focus of annual budgets away from sterilization of women and promote
meaningful involvement of men in taking contraceptive responsibility and
promotion of spacing methods.

It
asked to immediately remove all incentives (such as lotteries and awards) to
the acceptors of sterilizations and disincentives to persons with more than two
children, in all policies and schemes of the state and central governments. It also wanted a immediate end to all mass
sterilization camps and urged that all sterilization operations and IUCD
insertions must be conducted in well functioning health facilities following
standard operating procedures laid down by the government.

Describing the quality of care in sterilisation
and other family planning camps, Jhamman Bai, a woman leader from the Mahila
Swasthya Adhikar Manch, Uttar Pradesh, said poor women from the villages are
made to lie on thin mats in corridors and courtyards while the health
institutions lacked even basic facilities like toilets. She added that women
were often not given sterilisation certificates and therefore could not prove
that the operation had indeed taken place if something went wrong. Activist Devika
Biswas said that in Kaparfora in Bihar a camp was held in a school in defiance
of the Supreme Court orders. There was no pre-operative screening done here and
even very young women were being herded into the camp with scant respect for
privacy and dignity. A man from Madhya Pradesh said that even though he had
undergone sterilisation his wife had conceived and when he complained about the
failed operation to health authorities they taunted him about his wife’s
morality.

The testimonies clearly brought out that
as a result of poor quality of sterilisations, women ended up conceiving again,
facing medical complications and in some cases even dying. Generally
complications were not treated by the public health system and women ended up
spending large sums of money for private treatment. In cases of failure or
death when women and men or their families demanded for insurance promised by
the government they were discouraged or even threatened.

The hearing also highlighted the fact
that often consent was taken in a situation when the woman was on an operation
table and worse still was sterilized without consent, as in a case from Uttar
Pradesh where the doctor herself had decided that the woman had too many
children. Pratibha, an activist from Human Rights Law Network pointed out that
these violations were taking place not just in far flung rural areas not also
in the national capital of Delhi.

An analysis of budget allocation at the
hearing by Sona Mitra of the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability illustrated
that the family planning policy of the government is grossly biased in favour
of female sterilization with over 90 percent of the allocated family planning
expenditure going to it while male responsibility and other contraceptive methods
have scarcely any allocation. Moreover a large part of the health budget is
spent on cash incentive schemes like Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) to the
neglect of strengthening of public health infrastructure.

Responding
to the stories, Justice Cyriac Joseph said, “These are stories of heartrending
cruelty and it reflects not just human rights violations but also our
insensitivity as a society.” He informed the audience at the Public Hearing
that on November 12 the NHRC had issued notices to the government of India and
to the Chhattisgarh government asking them for an explanation of the tragedy
within two weeks. A month down the line the NHRC is yet to hear from them and is
now pursuing the matter.

Ramakant Rai the activist who filed a writ petition
in the Supreme Court in 2003 that led to the passing of the order on quality
standards for female sterilisation, said, “Sterilisation is not treatment for a
disease, it is an elective surgery and therefore those providing it are fully
accountable to ensure that there are no adverse outcomes.” He regretted that
despite the SC orders not much had changed on the ground.

AR Nanda, former secretary of the
ministry of health and family welfare, regretted that although the National
Population Policy of India, 2000, completely abjured targets and called for
quality of care, yet so many years later “we still find targets informally
imposed upon providers and motivators. He insisted, “India must uphold the
international agreements and commitments made at ICPD 1994 for addressing
rights violations, penalties must be imposed by the state if quality norms are
flouted and independent monitoring of quality of care must take place.”